AI policy
The words have to be yours.
Writer's Hook is a day for writing, not prompting. Generative AI is not permitted at the event, in the sprints, or in anything you submit.
The rule
No generative AI during the write-a-thon. Not for drafting, not for editing, not for getting unstuck at the start.
That includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and any other tool that produces sentences for you — whether it writes a whole scene or rewrites a paragraph you already have.
Why
You can get a passable poem out of a chatbot in four seconds. That is exactly why it isn’t interesting.
What is worth having at the end of the day is the evidence that you can do it: the hour you spent stuck, the bad first paragraph you pushed through, the sentence that finally landed. That is the thing you take home, and it only exists if you wrote it.
What’s still fine
We are banning generative tools, not spellcheck. All of this is fine:
- Spelling and grammar checkers, autocorrect, and the squiggly red line
- Dictionaries, thesauruses, and rhyming dictionaries
- Search engines and reference sites for research — looking things up is not the same as generating prose
- Your notes, outlines, and drafts from before the event
- Talking through your idea with a mentor, a friend, or the person next to you
Accessibility comes first
If you use speech-to-text, a screen reader, word prediction, or any assistive technology to write, use it. This policy is not aimed at you and will never be used against you. You do not owe anyone an explanation, and you do not need to disclose it.
If you are unsure whether a tool you rely on falls under this policy, ask an organizer before the sprints start. The answer will almost always be yes, keep using it.
Prizes and the anthology
When you submit work for a prize or for the anthology, you are affirming that you wrote it yourself, without generative AI, during or before the event.
We are not running detection software on your writing. Those tools are unreliable and they accuse honest writers, particularly multilingual ones. We are asking you instead, and taking your word for it.
If it comes up
The first response is a conversation, not a disqualification. If an organizer thinks something crossed the line, they will ask you about it privately and listen to your answer.
Work that turns out to be generated is withdrawn from prize consideration and from the anthology. Nobody is thrown out of the building over it.
Mentors and volunteers
The same rule applies to you. Do not run a student’s draft through an AI tool to generate feedback, line edits, or suggestions. They came here for a reader, and you are the reader.